Organizational Readiness

mark maxtedSenior Principal Engineer

Blue Coat Systems

Tactics for Success

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Motivations

● Why do usability initiatives so often meet with only qualified success?

● Why did a technique I used with great success at one company fail miserably at the next?

● Why am I so frustrated?

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Dimensions of Readiness

● Technical● Process● Cultural● Product/Market

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Technical Readiness

● How flexible is the underlying architecture?

– How often do you hear “we'd have to change our architecture” in an engineering response?

– Can you easily change data presentations?

– Is business logic separated from the workflow?

– How many interfaces do you have to support?

● How agile is your interface toolkit?

● Low: business logic and presentation intertwined and hard coded.

● High: well layered, “evolvable” UI technology

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Architectural Readiness

concrete user interfaces

abstract interface

virtual machine

features and services

platform

platform independence

agile toolkit

application/ business logic

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Process Readiness

● Are corporate processes (and the process to change them) well defined?

● Do they incorporate usability?

– What is the process for generating product requirements?

– Who owns the lexicon?● Are processes for UI and underlying technologies

distinct?

● Low: ad hoc processes, requirements expressed as features, individual engineers dictate terminology

● High: requirements expressed as use stories

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Cultural Readiness

● Technophilia vs Interdisciplinary Respect

– We don't know what we don't know

– People who don't know this aren't ready● Use ad hoc demonstrations

● Do QA and Customer Service have a say in requirements? What role does Docs play?

● Low: engineering claims “we know our users”

● Medium: usability is about panel design

● High: focus is on end to end customer experience

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Product/Market Readiness

● Emerging technologies and markets are feature driven

– Audiences are poorly defined

– Management reacts to early adopters

● Mature technologies are solution driven

– Audiences are better defined

– Management can turn down “distractions”

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Tactical Summary

● Do's– assess your

organization's readiness– recognize inertia– have realistic

expectations– be patient and

adaptable– develop a roadmap– exploit opportunities to

fund your roadmap

● Don'ts– act too far ahead of

your organization's readiness

– try to change too many things at once

– spread yourself too thin.

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